Conversion to Microsoft Enterprise Agreement

Justin Davison

6 Months

Duration

250

Users

250

Devices

$165000

Budget

Researched Microsoft Server Licensing and converted from Open Business without Software Assurance to an Enterprise Agreement. This allowed upgrades, provided an overall savings, and paved the way for a virtualization project.

Monroeville, Pennsylvania, United States

Team Members

Tagged MSPs

Categories

Historically my company had purchased Open Business licenses for server software. Upgrades were infrequent and required significant effort to create a business case. The majority of servers were running on 2003 and 2005 versions of Microsoft server products in 2010.

After attending a vendor sponsored event discussing Microsoft Licensing strategies it appeared that we were large enough to benefit from an Enterprise or Select Agreement with SA and realize long term savings.

After compiling a list of products and doing a ten year comparison against projected upgrades the EA was shown to be cheaper in all scenarios except avoiding all upgrades including those for unsupported software. The benefit would be the ability to upgrade on a regular cycle and simplified license management.

At this time we were not running any hypervisor based virtualization, though several test systems used server based virtualization. Many servers were running on aging hardware which would virtualize well. After doing a comparison between covering all physical servers or buying Windows DataCenter Edition for two virtual hosts it was found that purchasing DataCenter would free up around $12,000 towards a virtualization project to realize the savings.

A business case and presentation was created and given to top executives and strategic decision makers. After looking at the numbers and options they agreed to shift to an Enterprise Agreement and initiate a virtualization project to use funds in the most effective manner possible.